An opossum prepped by David Grossnickle, who studies the evolution of mammalian jaw morphology. CT image by Julia Schultz.

CEB student Amy Henry at her field site on Tatoosh Island.

Welcome to the Committee on Evolutionary Biology

The Committee on Evolutionary Biology (CEB) is a unique interdepartmental and inter-institutional graduate student training program dedicated to the study of Evolutionary Biology. Faculty and students in the program are engaged in interdisciplinary studies at time scales that range from single generations to the entire history of life and at organizational scales from the molecular to the global.

Collecting Sticta dichotomy s. lat. in Jamaica

Spotlight

July I spent mostly in Puerto Rico. This trip was really fantastic! I got to see my family and also participated in the 11th International Mycological Congress, which to my luck was celebrated in San Juan. This is the most important and largest mycological gathering of all. My participation in the meeting was vast. I served as a field guide for three different field trips in different forests of the island. I was also a symposium organizer and speaker. My talk was about the use of integrative taxonomic approaches to understand the diversity of the lichen genus Sticta in Puerto Rico. The name of the symposium (which I organized with Thorsten Lumbsch and Robert Lucking) was: Lichens on Islands: Evolution, Endemism, and Conservation.

Events

News

Research by CEB Professor Susan Kidwell and her collaborator Dr. Adam Tomašových, Earth Science Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, is featured in this article by University of Southern California (USC) Sea Grant: https://spark.adobe.com/page/rRLMxHBJlA1EL/

Montana State University is the state’s land grant institution. It creates knowledge and art, and serves communities by integrating learning, discovery, and engagement. The Department of Microbiology and Immunology plays an important role in this mission by providing research, teaching, and service in topics ranging from environmental microbiology, molecular genetics, host-parasite interactions, and disease ecology, to developmental immunology and pathogenicity.
The Branco Lab studies the ecology and evolution of fungi to further understand the ecological factors that generate and maintain fungal diversity. Specifically, we use a combination of field, laboratory, and computational approaches to investigate how fungi colonize and persist in the environment. Our studies range across biological scales from ecological communities to genomes and genes, emphasizing evolutionary adaptation to hostile environments.

This summer I studied the postcranial anatomy of Whatcheeria. It’s an Early Carboniferous tetrapod, and important because both it’s uniquely primitive for its age and represented by lots of specimens that cover essentially the entire skeleton- almost unheard of for an early tetrapod. Despite consistently being recovered on the tetrapod stem in phylogenetic analyses, it shares a number of skeletal features with the anthracosaurs, a phylogenetically more derived Carboniferous-Permian group that are frequently considered to be amniote relatives. I’m looking forward describing these features with new phylogenetic characters and finding out if they change Whatcheeria’s phylogenetic position and our understanding of early tetrapod relationships. This is part of my research that’s broadly focused on understanding the evolutionary and ecological changes in the aftermath of the end-Devonian extinction 359 million years ago. Here's a link to Ben's new article: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pala.12395